Thermo-mechanical coupling in multilayered plates and shells

This paper proposes a fully-coupled thermomechanical analysis of multilayered plates and shells. In the proposed refined plate/shell models, the temperature is considered as a primary variable of the problem as the displacement and it is directly obtained from the governing equations. Such models are very promising for multilayered structures because they permit both equivalent single layer and layer wise approaches and they have the order of expansion in the thickness direction as a free parameter (from linear to fourth order). Three different problems can be analyzed: evaluation of temperature field effects in the free vibration analysis of multilayered plates and shells; evaluation of temperature field effects in the stress analysis of multilayered structures subjected to mechanical loads; thermal stress analysis of multilayered structures with imposed sovra-temperature.